Email technology is a good and useful tool for personal and business communications. However, it is being hijacked and tarnished by unscrupulous criminals called spammers. Most people in the world enjoy an email account or two. What people do not like is getting email messages that they do not want or need. This includes spam email of course, but for many people it also includes messages forward from friends and family; things like chain letters and jokes you have read a million times already. Spammers take advantage of careless email users who do not use common sense when emailing. The best way to stay spam free is to only give your email to those close to you.
This often backfires however, when your sister-in-law forwards something to you and includes all of her email contacts in the message. Invariably someone will cc someone else who decides to harvest your email to send you spam offers. Novice email users do not realize that their email clients automatically add people to whom they reply to their address book. This means that when your sister-in-law adds her entire email address list to a forwarded message, some of those who receive the email are spammers to whom she has fallen prey.
Separating business and personal emails is a good idea. In business, you will get a lot of spam from business related newsletters for which you sign up. It is pretty much inevitable that you'll eventually get spam to a business account. Many spammers target company address with a dictionary attack, adding all the names ever given to the front part of a company address. Invariably there is a bill@yourcompany.com at your company. Most people want to use email addresses that they remember easily, but it might be a good idea to make them a little more difficult to guess what they are. Add some numbers to the mix and many dictionary attacks will fail.
Posting your email address on a website is a surefire way to get spam. If you have a domain name, you typically have an email address posted somewhere if you want people to reach you via email. There are some handy email obfuscators available that convert your email address to html code. The email will work when clicked, but will not be noticed by the harvesting bots rummaging through your site. Contact web forms can also help eliminate company email addresses getting harvested. Your email is also listed during a who is look-up for your domain. Some domain hosting companies now offer private registration so you don't have to expose your email to the outside world. If someone needs to get a hold of you through your who is record, the hosting company will forward it to you if it seems legitimate.
The fastest way to get spam emails is to accidentally open or respond to a spam email. This will verify to the spammer that your email address is legitimate. It is difficult to tell sometimes who sent an email or where it came from. Spammers will use images to track the message to see if it is open. Even looking at the message in a preview pane will make a trackable image request back to the spammers sever. Once they verify your address is real, they will send you tons more spam, and worse yet, sell your verified email to all their spamming friends.
So what is a soul to do to prevent all this spam? There are several things you can do to eliminate, or at least minimize the dangers. - Separate your real email address from ones you use to sign up for things on the Internet. Only give this email address to close friends or relatives who understand that you don't want to get junk forwarded to you every time they get something forwarded to them.
- Set up a sign up address. This is an address that you use to sign up for offers, newletters, bank accounts, travel sites, and newsletters. Eventually, you may start getting junk to this folder, but if you are careful about the places where you sign up, you can track down and tell where the problem originated and can appeal to the perpetrator to cease. If they do not you may have to report them to a black hole list service or complain to their ISP.
- Set up some additional throw away accounts. These are email accounts for sites where you want to get information for which you have to register, but you know that by registering, you are going to get a bunch of junk. Using this type of address will let you sign up and get the information you need and then move on. You can ignore the account until you need to sign up for something else.
- Turn off the preview pane in your email client. Most of the time you can tell when a message is spam by the from address or the subject line. If you have the preview pane open however, you may end up landing on a spam email and notifying them of the fact that you are a valid address. By keeping the preview pane closed you will be able to delete all the spammy email before you start reading the valid email you receive.
Never buy from a spammer. It only takes one person to purchase a spam product and perpetuate the cycle. The only way the Internet community will stop spam is to make it unprofitable. There are many ideas about how to stop spam, none of which have been widely adopted or implemented. It will still be a few years before a comprehensive solution is agreed upon. In the meantime, you will need to protect yourself from spam as best you can by adopting the previously cited steps.
Pathfinder Email Consulting helps email marketers establish and maintain their email reputation.
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